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For those interested in Node.js, Fedora 28 currently ships with 6.x, 8.x and 9.x versions available and I am building 10.0 at this very moment. It should be available in the updates-testing repositories by tomorrow.
I'm glad you have found Fedora to be very stable. It's something we work very, very hard to accomplish. Fedora has long-since stopped referring to itself as "bleeding-edge", though. We've adopted the term "leading-edge" instead, which we intend to mean that we always try to ship the latest stable version of software, rather than in the early days where it was always the latest version. (There's a subtle but important difference there).
As for the non-free software, device drivers, etc.: I really wish it was just that simple. We have had lawyers working for years trying to find a way to do that, but the simple fact of the matter is that Fedora's sponsor is Red Hat, Inc. which is incorporated in the USA. A lot of really terrible laws are in place in the US that mean that if we even tried to do what you are suggesting, it puts us at risk of something called "contributory infringement". Basically, it means that we can be sued in the United States for every person that uses a script we provide for acquiring non-free software in a way that constitutes infringement. For most other distros, they usually just take the risk because they don't have a wealthy backer that could be targeted by patent lawyers. For Ubuntu, they incorporated in the Isle of Man tax-haven specifically because they don't have a treaty with the USA that would get in the way.
As for SELinux, I've been running with SELinux in enforcing mode as a developer for the last seven years. It has been a very long time since it stopped me from accomplishing anything I should be expecting to have work. Occasionally there are bugs in it, but with the advent of SELinux Troubleshooter, I can click a button to allow the action for the moment and send a bug to the SELinux developers who will update the policy, usually within a week.
SELinux has come a long way in the last few years, and I think you'd be surprised to see how much less obtrusive it is. Most people I know that have it turned off have simply done so because they've been doing it that way for 5+ years and have simply assumed that nothing has changed.
As a long-time Fedora developer (and a member of FESCo during the switch over to systemd), I take offense at the idea that we claimed a lack of polish was okay. Far from it; we've spent a lot of time and effort in finishing up all of the tools you just described. I gather from your statements here that you haven't actually run Fedora in the recent past.
Did some of these things land before they were absolutely perfect? Of course. Someone has to be the first to deliver something. You can never figure out what your software is lacking until someone is using it. Fedora takes risks. As we've seen time and time again, once Fedora proves that something works (and has made the effort to polish it up), the other distributions generally pick them up and run with them. NetworkManager, systemd, SSSD, etc... all of these came to Fedora first, were improved upon there and then were adopted widely.
I keep having to remind people: Fedora does have a rolling release. It's called Rawhide and you can move any currently-supported Fedora system to it by running 'fedup --network rawhide'. This will always carry all of the packages that will become the next version of Fedora. It's fairly stable these days (not like its early history, where only the exceptionally brave would dare install it).
Lastly, our approach to codecs and proprietary device drivers is entirely because our hands are tied by legal obligations that other distributions don't have to deal with. (Canonical incorporated in a tax-haven country specifically to avoid this problem; many other distributions simply don't have an entity involved with sufficient money to be worth suing). We know it's an issue. It's one of the reasons Red Hat, Inc. is lobbying so heavily for patent reform in the United States. There are mechanisms out there for getting these tools (such as third-party repositories maintained by our non-US community), but if we tried to ship them in Fedora, we'd immediately be sued into nonexistence. So we have to choose the bad option instead of the catastrophic one.